Overview

  • Light Detection and Ranging (lidar)
  • The lidR package - a brief introduction
  • Workshop overview

What is LiDAR?

  • Light Detection and Ranging
  • Active form of remote sensing
  • Measures distance to target surfaces with millions of narrow light pulses
  • Airborne laser scanning performs lidar systematically from aircraft or drones

LiDAR Data - Point Clouds

  • Discrete returns are aggregated as points in point clouds (LAS/LAZ)
  • These datasets contain geo-referenced points with three-dimensional (XYZ) coordinates, and other attributes; intensity, return number etc…
  • Point clouds can be processed into summaries of vegetation structure with lidR

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lidR

  • Package for manipulating and visualizing ALS data
  • Focused on forestry and ecological applications but broadly applicable beyond
  • Written entirely open source within R-geospatial ecosystem (terra/sf)
  • Runs efficiently with backend C++ code to perform processing

Workshop Outline

  • Introduction to Lidar and lidR (09:00)
  • Reading LAS and LAZ files (09:10)
  • Point Classification and filtering (9:15)
  • Digital Terrain Models and Height Normalization (9:25)
  • Canopy Height Models (9:35)
  • Lidar Summary Metrics (9:50)
  • File Collection Processing Engine (10:10)

Get Set Up!